LULLABY
Article by Mairead Turner, 2005
Choreographer and director Jasmin Vardimon has a special propensity for brutal honesty and uncomfortable truths. Her work illuminates the way that society and its institutions deal with the underbelly of our experiences, instabilities and sicknesses.
Lullaby is for me a heart-wrenching study of people in crisis operating within a controlled system terrifyingly bigger than any of us. The set is a series of hospital curtains which deftly transform the performance space into waiting room, ward, staff room and operating theatre. The locations are populated by patients, loved ones, doctors and nurses who are, in turn, embodied by a five-strong ensemble of incredibly virtuosic dancers. If nurses are portrayed as neurotics, with comic tics of the neck and harangued smiles, the doctors seem sleazily voyeuristic. During an examination one doctor wears a tiny video camera, allowing us to view the patient's body projected onto a screen in uncomfortably extreme and lingering close-up. In another scene a doctor manipulates a seemingly unconscious, doll-like dancer, a transgressive encounter so disturbing in its connotations of rape and its unnerving power that I feel the audience sitting motionless, its collective breath drawn in, appalled yet transfixed.
In another scene a doctor delivers an authorative lecture, explaining that sometimes it becomes necessary to attack the disease and, therefore, the body in the hope that the former will be destroyed and the latter recover. While speaking he repeatedly attacks a nurse, demonstrating his metaphor by grappling her to the floor and nearly suffocating her with a pillow. The child-like violence of his actions has a distinctly dark, surreal humour when set against the calm words of his scientific discourse.
Jasmin depicts with heart-wrenching accuracy an organisation which should serve and heal us, repair our broken, damaged, aged or diseased bodies and send us back to our loved ones. She makes us face the uneasy hyper-reality of an institution governed by doctors who are portrayed as abusive, cold and clinical, who violate and transgress their patients' bodies in inappropriately sexualised and grossly disrespectful ways. The interactions are both de-personalised and over-personalised.
Jasmin's view could be interpreted as harsh. I want to be balanced. I know that there are many good doctors and nurses who truly want to help people. And yet if contemporary dance reflects the body within society, there is surely no more poignant reflection on both than a diseased body in decline and hospitalised. In the UK we have a one in three chance of being diagnosed with cancer. For many of us the huge, mortality-battling dramas brought out by this or some other major illness is usually staged not in a familiar envrionment or our own communities, but in the often unavoidable institution of a hospital. It is the frame for a series of processes that must happen according to the doctor's synopsis. It provides a structure and a locale where treatment is inevitable.
I feel so glad, so warmed, that in Lullaby Jasmin is able to reflect on the common reality of this place. Even as Jasmin was researching and creating it, I was witnessing a slow spreading of cancer amongst friends who began nursing their way through its unswerving course as it ate away at their parents. My friends were sleepwalking through a haze of pain, confusion, disbelief and terror at their mothers or fathers decline, at the fragility of life and their own powerlessness. I watched, listened and felt silenced by the overwhelming taboo of illness and death. Suddenly cancer was omnipotent.
Conversing with these friends taught me a new way of talking, an inherited doctoring of language. The cause and effect of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and endless operations, the tumours spreading through colonised body parts and organs, took precedence over the personality of the parent. This essentially human element seemed to slowly disappear, replaced by a new, abstract and biological identity.
Jasmin made Lullaby as a reaction to losing her father to cancer and she has dedicated this piece to him. Two friends, both of whom also lost parents to cancer, saw Lullaby and found the experience to be profound and uplifting.
I've written these thoughts as everything I feel I am when I've watched Lullaby:Jasmin's ongoing fan and former company manager; the friend of a surgeon, a medic and a nurse; a witness to others grief and a daughter aware of the possibility that I may some day need to deal with the passing of my own loved ones; and a woman increasingly aware of her own mortality. Filtered through this odd litany of roles, Lullaby moves me deeply and triggers so many questions. I wonder why people lose the right to experience their own deaths as they choose, why we continue to operate on those who have a small chance of survival, and just who has choice and control when a loved one is facing serious illness? I fear the haunting nature of these and other questions, but Lullaby reassures me that they are valid.
Reading this you may be thinking, 'My god, do I really want to sit through this show?' And yet I so want people to see Lullaby. It's funny, beautiful, real, moving, important and radical. It features accomplished, highly skilled dancers who have learnt their craft over long periods of research, development and rehearsal and during a tour which is hitting its sixtieth date (virtually unheard of in dance on this scale). Lullaby also has a somewhat Brit-pop feel of young, incredibly talented artists collaborating, and using cutting-edge video projection and animation to surprising and satisfying effect.
Jamsin's work seems to me to be the epitome of contemporary dance. How old-fashioned so much else that goes by that name seems in comparison. It's one of those works of art that stays with you, that makes you realise that dance can be political and entertaining, and that it can speak about things with a depth and profundity words alone can't reach.
Londondance.com / April 2003
By Sanjoy Roy
A gnomic figure, head and arms atop a tiny sackcloth body, pops out from behind hospital-bed curtains, as if they were the drapes of a fairground sideshow. His spiel is comic, vulgar, bullish. But, making a display of his refined side, he is moved to scribble down a poem - until he reaches the line 'my mother and father are dead', when he breaks into exaggerated sobs, blows his nose with gusto on the notebook, and rips it to shreds.
Set in a hospital ward, Jasmin Vardimon's Lullaby is dedicated to the memory of her father, Nadav. But Lullaby is neither romantic nor comforting: like its pithy opening, it is fuelled by a burning black humour, sometimes icily clinical, sometimes stoked with aggression and rage. It hinges on a double vision: illness as alien invader, or as integral to the self. The body is its battleground. A doctor (Gavin Rees), thwacks his demure assistant nurse (Mafalda Deville) with a pillow, explaining that the patient's body is under attack. She is goaded into counter-attack, the lecture-demonstration developing into escalating rounds of a fight club. Later, Rees manhandles the corpse of Kath Duggan in a one-sided duet that shades from mawkish cradling to necrophiliac fondling. Where Duggan's body sags and flops, Vardimon's own turn as a brittle mechanical doll evinces a different kind of lifelessness: her synthetic tics conceal no depth, her plastic heart, pinned to her coat, pulses like a cardiograph.
The choreography is physically risky, sometimes bruisingly so, and often refreshingly inventive. Hofesh Shechter dances a solo of opposing impulses, arms blocking each other, torso twisted against the ungainly swing of his legs. Duggan is especially impressive, gangling twitches and jerks sending her body into arrhythmic spasms, to spot-on comic effect. Vardimon can be pat - three women hula-dancing with skirts at half-mast, jiggling their builder's cleavages. But her use of props is inspired: a quartet twirls their Zimmer frames as easily as if they were majorettes' batons; Shechter, a blithely nonchalant interviewer, drums and scrapes his microphone against Rees's body to generate a funky electronic tattoo. With its multimedia theatrics - movement, film, speech and sound - and its constant shifts of tone and pace, Lullaby is a sprawling, ambitious work that is inevitably patchy in places. And though it is certainly overlong, losing some focus in the second half, it also contains some of the best physical theatre currently on show.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT TLS / 21 February 2005
By Roderick Swanston
Jasmin Vardimom's Dance Company was founded in 1997. Through a variety of dance styles and techniques she has focused on issues of health and sickness. Lullaby is no exception. It is set in a hospital ward and uses the privacy curtains and a very strong hospital bed for some of the scenes and acts.
Lullaby uses five dancers that included Vardimon herself as well as Leon Brough, Luke Burrough, Mafalda Deville and Kath Duggan. The best part of the evening was the superlative movement of the dancers. Vardimon in her choreography requires very precise athletic movement; much of the time dancers seems to bent or bending double, and in their duos to be twisting each other round in what in other circumstances would be considered violent. Yet the dancers are athletes, and while they don't make the moves seem effortless they are never less than graceful and perfectly controlled.
It's inevitable in dance you consider the body, and through the body the health of the body and its desires. In both boy/girl and boy/boy scenes there was a good deal of suggested sexuality, both in the second scene in the hospital waiting room between two young opposite gender lovers and in the excellent scene where one dancer uses the microphone for some outstanding body-rhythm. While dancing he also makes the music by tapping the long-lead microphone on his body, on his partner's body and on other physical objects. The dexterity of the rhythm-making and the rich range of imaginative uses of the microphone made this scene a good example of Vardimon at her best using minimal resources to maximum effect. Though it would be hard to single out any particular dancer as all five work as a team and the contribution of each is well matched. However, the two male dancers with the amount of lifting and twisting seemed slightly to steal the show in the sheer exuberance, polish and conviction of their movements.
Kultureflash / 10 March 2003
Lullaby's title is ironic, even sick, which rather befits this quirky drama of sex, violence and incontinence on a hospital ward that's introduced by a slapstick dwarf. Politically correct it isn't, but Vardimon's dance theatre has a compelling dark-magic realism; magnifying neuroses and transforming familiar social ritual into surreal nightmare. Which is what this genre of contemporary dance does best. Just as its forerunners, DV8, lifted the lid off cruise culture in the uptight, AIDS-panicked '80s with graphic honesty, so Vardimon's updated offering subverts the soap-fuelled sick-bed fantasies we hold so dear, and exposes the sado-masochistic subtexts of the medical encounter. Doctors try it on with patients, patients take it out on nurses, and biological warfare reigns as patients take the rap for their diseases. Lullaby is danced with the bruising physicality and forensic precision of Vardimon's choreography, while her own live-wire performance steals the show. Stylish animation and video gadgetry add to its grotesque cartoon aesthetic. Not for the squeamish.